fortDesk: a playful workspace
[vc_row][vc_column width="1/1"] I've been working on creating these toyls (toy-tools) with simple circuits and using interesting materials that prompt playful interactions. As I was creating them and started sharing them, I realized that they were all lacking one...
What Play Is(n’t)
I've been spinning my wheels trying to come up with a solid definition of “play” that assimilates all of the research I’ve done and fully and accurately describes my use of the word/idea in my research endeavors (and in life in general). As Brain Sutton-Smith argues...
Explorations in Making: Paper Circuitry
Paper circuitry is something I've only worked with tangentially before, and I've always thought it was a really cool idea. I chose paper circuitry as a medium to explore primarily because I was interested in the idea that paper is something you find in almost every...
Introducing… The BRAINCHILDREN
For Graduate Critique, we were given an assignment to make a media representation of our creative praxis. I was struggling a bit as the only non-fine arts student in the class, so I went with what I'm good at- stories. I decided to take this opportunity to teach...
Playful Verbs
Rather than provide a concrete list of play activities (e.g. go for a bike ride, tell a story, sing a song, etc.) this list of playful verbs allows the reader (and the author) to use their own imagination to decide how these verbs can be used to create play states....
WorkToy: an Internet of Things experiment
[vc_row][vc_column width="1/1"] WorkToy is a desktop toy and internet of things object made with a Spark Core. WorkToy sits on a platform that acts as a button- recording whether or not the toy is on the platform. Many of the libraries and even the example code...
JavaBean Coffee Cup: an Internet of Things experiment
JavaBean isn't your average coffee cup- JavaBean is equipped with a LightBlue Bean microcontroller that connects via bluetooth to your computer and tells you how much coffee you've consumed today. The LightBlue Bean device rests in the underbelly of the JavaBean...
Cultural Event 3 – MediaLive 2014
For me, the highlight of the MediaLive 2014 performances was Nick Briz. Nick introduced the concept of lock-in to me: when an element of technology becomes "locked-in" as the norm and a basis for which all technological elements after it are built upon, even long...
Cultural Event 2 – Processing & p5.js Workshops with Casey Reas & Dan Shiffman
Casey Reas' Processing workshop focused on pixel manipulation. While many of the functions Casey discussed were things I had heard of and/or seen in code before, his explanations helped me understand how to work with images in Processing in a way I hadn't thought of...
IoT Process – Week 10
After quite a bit of tinkering and experimenting, I was able have a Google Spreadsheet retrieve the button state from my Spark Core once a minute and append a row to the spreadsheet with the value of the button state as well as a the timestamp of the retrieval. I used...